Rentlar, 1 year ago

There are certain niches where automated mirroring is a little useful.

Game day threads, part sales (where people need to be quick) are a couple examples.

I have most post bots blocked though (lemmit, alien, lululemon, etc.).

Like others said the downsides are that they drown out original posts and discussions with authors that never respond to comments. Consequently, the not-logged-in experience on instances that “leave it up to users to block” will appear messy and full of garbage.

I think they have their place but those automated should be contained to communities that want them, easily identified, easy to block and post rate limited to reasonable levels.

A yet to be developed feature in Lemmy would be the ability to somehow “opt-in follow” automated bot posts rather than the current “opt-out” model.